Andrew OHagan All hail, sage lady: The Crown LRB 15 Decembe...

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Vol. 38 No. 24 15 December 2016

pages 15-16 | 2581 words
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All hail, sage lady

Andrew OHagan watches The Crown

Andrew OHagans
The Secret Life will be
published by Faber in
the spring. His latest
novel, The
Illuminations, is being
made into a BBC TV
series.

MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

Khrush in America
Khrushchev in America
Blame it on the boogie
In Pursuit of Michael
Jackson
Valet of the Dolls
Sinatra
Diary
Dr Macgregors Diagnosis
Candle Moments
Norman Lewiss
Inventions
A Car of Ones Own
Chariots of Desire
A City of Prose
In Tavistock Square

I dont think the queen liked me. Shed seen it all before, the snooping anti-monarchist
with the new tie, so she simply passed me to her husband, who asked if a novelist wrote
books. As often with the duke, his question lay somewhere between existential brilliance
and intergalactic dunce-hood. I merely smiled in imitation of his lovely wife. Prince
Philip is a pure catch for a dramatist. Imagine nearly seventy years in the mellow
afterglow of someone elses radiance, two steps behind, a man infantilised beyond
belief, provided with everything in return for being a constant second. Its not such an
unusual story if youre a woman, but for a 1940s naval officer striated with pride, it
came to seem, if reports are true, like a life sentence. William Shawcross, in his expertly
genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after
his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has
just achieved and hopes will bless the future. Lilibet is the only thing in this world
which is absolutely real to me, he wrote, and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a
new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us
but will also have a positive existence for the good. And yet, back in the real world, he
couldnt let his children have his name (they wouldnt allow him to), he couldnt keep
his family in the home he had chosen for them, and his frustrations grew dark.
Recently, when the actor Matt Smith was introduced to Prince William and the prince
was told Smith would soon be playing his grandfather in an epic Netflix series, The
Crown, William offered only one word. Legend, he said, as if they were talking about
Dolly Parton. And that is the way the boys view their grandfather, as a one-off, a classic
exemplar, rather than the mythic, intransigent beast of agonised loyalty known to their
father.
The Duke of Edinburgh becomes a wayward soul as The Crown progresses, a
nincompoop with honours, swimming against the tide of political correctness with Boys
Own brio and a racist heart. In Episode 2, he arrives in Kenya with Princess Elizabeth
(Claire Foy) at the beginning of a tour of the Commonwealth. The scene opens with a
group of African boys chasing ostriches off the runway. Philip, dressed in a starched
naval uniform with gold braiding, stripes and medals, points to some medals on a
tribesmans chest. Oh, gosh, look, Ive got that one, he says. Oh, Christ, Ive got that
one, too. Oh, come off it, where did you steal that one from, eh? The tribesman doesnt
respond but the whole line gives him the Mau Mau glare. The series, when it graduates
to being a splendid box-set, might show us how that tendency in Philip never changed,
while the world changed around him. Its his tragedy, and our comedy, or the reverse,
that he got to live out his inferiority complex on the worlds stage.
The Crown is like Coronation Street with coronations, and it is as riveting as a British
soap opera based on the ultimate British soap opera should be. Naturally, it was
produced for American digital broadcaster Netflix at a cost of 100 million, but that is
what it costs these days to make England look like England. The show was created and
written by Peter Morgan, its majesty and its wit are his it would take an American
writers room of a dozen to do wrong what he does right and a slew of British
directing talent led by Stephen Daldry has brought it to the small screen. The British
settings are spectacular, the whole thing like an implosion of David Kynaston, but the
main achievement is Morgans, in finding ways to show the human side of monarchy.
The British royals are a terrifying shower, but quite likeable, and sometimes essential,
in their daftness, in their cunning and their opportunism, as well as in their willingness
to place their own brief lives in suspended, glittering animation, so that the rest of us
can feel lucky in our freedoms and our relative immunity from stifling duty. We have a
long way to go I predict countless, well-shod episodes, from Lilibets brogues to Lady
Dianas Jimmy Choos and the emerging picture of a disappearing Britain may be too
intoxicating to resist. The islands that these people ruled over are no more, or no more
what they were, and the fog of cursing and conspiracy that distinguishes The Crown is
already proving a friendly place in which to experience the pomp of our fading national
story.

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Before we come to Philips internal strife, we have to contend with the randy bonhomie
of old King George. It is said that American viewers are distressed to find the word
cunt used in the first episode, spoken by George VI (Jared Harris) to his valet, but
perhaps this is merely the latest in a long line of gifts from Britain to the former
colonies, a way, shall we say, of normalising, even dignifying such laxity in the naming
of female parts, in preparation for future press briefings by the president elect. The
Crown opens with the dying king spitting blood into the lavatory bowl and he is almost
followed in this habit of expectoration by his brave wife, Cookie, who runs short of
breath every time she hears the words Wallis Simpson. Everyone smokes, especially
Princess Margaret, who smokes for the United Kingdom, plus Antigua and Barbuda
yet the smoke fails quite to obscure the devastations brought about by American
divorcees, for whom, apparently, the thread of tradition is no match for a golden
bathtub and a Cartier wristwatch studded with diamonds. George VI is a steadily
melting stoic before the prospect of an early death, and he denotes, with pallid looks, a
stuttering speech and watering eyes, an almost Shakespearean notion of the monarchs
thankless task. There are times in The Crown when it seems as if every minor lady-inwaiting, to say nothing of the higher-ups, would sooner be serving tea and buns at a
Lyons Corner House than serving the nation, but privilege shows no mercy.
The king dies in 1952. His abdicated brother returns for his funeral and is met by his
mother, Queen Mary (Eileen Atkins), who announces very greyly that he mustnt
mention that womans name. David, or the Duke of Windsor as the lapsed Edward VIII
is now to be called, is a benumbed and bitchy mummys boy (played here by Alex
Jennings, a seasoned royal impersonator), and he spends the entirety of The Crowns
first series bumbling about and giggling at farting pugs. Some people imagine that such
a life is no kind of life at all, but the avoidance of tasks can be a full-time job, and the
Duke of Windsor is as bold in this respect as the checks on his suits. The throwing off
and taking on of fetters is a major theme in the series, and Peter Morgan shows himself
to be indifferent to the rules of the panegyric. Early on, the duke refers to my smug,
stinking relations, and part of Morgans achievement is to offer a truly dramatic,
case-by-case study of a family in crisis. On the other hand, he isnt immune to what
Robert Frost once called the august occasions of the state, and this makes his drama
all the stronger. In Episode 3, when George VI is dead and the aforementioned David
turns up at Marlborough House to have tea with Queen Mary, the atmosphere is
daintily dark. She sits there, wreathed in pearls and dwarfed by gloomy pictures, the
clock sounding the seconds, while her disappointing son bends to kiss her. Poor Bertie,
he says, not quite knowing how to seem anything but a failure to his mother. Eileen
Atkins looks as if she has lemon juice coursing through her veins. One can only be
thankful for all the years one had him, she replies. So wonderfully thoughtful and
caring, an angel to his mother, wife and children. I honestly believe he never thought of
himself at all. He really was the perfect son. And with that she rises from her chair. The
clocks stop and the painted royals almost blush as she leaves the room.
In Shakespeares history plays, the fertile tongue is forever crowding in on the
ambitions of love and power; it is words that are the spring of action. (This tongue that
runs so roundly in thy head, Richard II says, Should run thy head from thy unreverent
shoulders.) The Crown has few pretences, and it isnt Shakespeare, but it sets up a
properly sophisticated relationship between words and actions, a relationship in which
saying and not saying is all we need for tension. Every courtier and minister has things
they would prefer to see happen and they enforce those preferences with language.
Perhaps this is the reason, we learn by watching The Crown, that the royal family is
unable to keep secrets: language is too active an agent in their constitutional nature.
(The average family is much better than the royals at keeping its secrets. I mean, every
family has a Diana, for instance, or a reckless grandfather, but with zero interest from
the public most of us are able to shush the things that would lessen dignity.) Princess
Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) is a puff of words in a Norman Hartnell dress, arguing her
case for marrying Group Captain Townsend; Winston Churchill is chapter and verse,
bowed over with rhetoric, while the queen redounds with clauses and quells her worries
with an amputating no. By Episode 6, I was certain that the subversive element in The
Crown is strong, in some measure because of the way it exposes the royals by
undressing their silence with words.
Of course, with contemporary drama, one must always be alert to the possibility of fibs
or the question of libel. The royal family, in a way, are a bit like the dead: you cant quite
libel them, but you can insult their memory. And yet the royals various press offices, at
least since the heyday of Charles and Diana and possibly long before, have sparred
constantly in what they derisively call the court of public opinion. The life of a British
royal, if the merrily-bearded Prince Harry is to be believed, is an endless round of lies
and harassment, with the publics addiction to fantasy the major spur. Hugo Vickers,
the eminent historian or the historian of eminence, took to the Times the other day to
state, among other things, that The Crown is inaccurate FALSE in its suggestion
that Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip were charged by an elephant while in Kenya. I
have to say I dont fully care; it was simply time, in that particular episode, for Philip to
stare down an elephant, the kind of event for which poetic licence was surely invented. I

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hate to drag old, wounded High Culture into the frame, but Holinsheds Chronicles
make no mention of bra-less witches in their account of Macbeth, speaking only of fairy
nymphs. Imagine how sad wed be to lose the snaggle-toothed ones snorting and
prophesying at the hurly-burly to come. Realism isnt the point of the royals, or of the
stories that surround them and raise them into history, and fibs are fine, so long as they
tap at the human problems underneath.
Only the queen will emerge well from The Crown. She is still in her twenties in the first
series, but, already, the former Lilibet hands joined prettily in front, corgis engaged at
the ankles, her hair a crown of tousled airs is an ageless woman ready to run the
empire from a sofa covered in Colefax and Fowler. Prince Philip, all the while, is out
being young, driving silly cars, and generally rebelling against the demands of tradition.
Not that the Greek playboy is really part of her tradition, but the point is shes on her
own, and always will be in the mind of the British public, a distantly amused country
woman raised to uncomplaining servitude, ready to see out at least seventy years and
12 prime ministers. Claire Foy, who plays her, is softer and more searching than the
original: to the viewer, her queen is a vividly shy person who must watch in slow motion
as her limitations are swamped by demands. Foy shows enormous subtlety in capturing
the way fear and inexperience may bake, under the correct conditions, into a nearly
impeccable hauteur, but the overall effect will be to remind people of Elizabeth IIs
quiet martyrdom. All hail, sage lady, a photographer says to her as he takes her
picture in the final episode. She wears the crown, and all normal loyalties to sisters and
husbands and fathers memory are now quelled. Not moving, not breathing, the
image-maker continues. Glorious Gloriana. Forgetting Elizabeth Windsor now now
only Elizabeth Regina.
It may appear odd in the minds of those who have other flags to wave that these English
nobs in their palaces are to be thought of as being chiefly sacrificial bodies, but in their
own pampered way the royals do give up their freedom in meeting their roles, and
theres drama in that. Im not sure, in these troubled times, that The Crown will have us
weeping quietly at how the caged bird sings, but the whole pantomime is given a fresh,
ironic airing here. The older queens, Mary and Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, were very
keen on sacrifice: the queen mother famously felt that her family had to stay in London
during the war so that they could look the East End in the face; while Mary, a Victorian
effigy in her weedy trophies, felt her abdicated son had let down those who sacrificed
sons in the Great War. In view of all that, and with one foot perpetually on the bottom
step of the Cenotaph, the current queen learned early that sacrifice is the only game in
town. Amid the fluttering of dresses and the ticking of clocks, the cheering of the crowds
and the turning of the carriage wheels, British royalty at least the television kind, and
probably the real ones, too must forever reckon with the conundrum of having to give
away so much in order to seem to have everything. It is my duty, says our television
queen, to refuse Margaret marriage to a divorced man. Everyone advises me so. And
yet I will be breaking a promise not only to my sister, but also to my late father. She
advises Anthony Eden to persuade his cabinet colleagues to allow the marriage and she
says she will do her best to persuade the Church. But the audience knows what must
happen: Margaret must give up Peter, the queen must give up Margaret, the crown
must survive its wearers.
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